Highlands versus Lowlands, an introduction to the Ethnic Minorities of Vietnam

Growing up in the US, a cultural milieu seems normal as immigrants assimilate into the culture after a few generations. This is not the same for every country. Despite what some political reporters may purport, the US is an open society that welcomes immigration. Typically, the first generation identifies with their home culture while subsequent generations have less of a connection with their ancestral culture.

Cultural amnesia can be delayed if a family lives in an ethnic enclave, but after a few generations, the ancestral culture would seem alien to the children. I have watched this assimilation happen to friends while growing up in Southern California, where many of the boat people landed after 1975. In the case of Vietnamese, these people are called Viet Kieu¹, meaning Vietnamese living outside of Vietnam. If you have lived in Vietnam for a while, it is pretty easy to tell the difference between native Vietnamese and Viet Kieu. Viet Kieu stand out in a crowd in Vietnam.

The culture in Vietnam is completely different. It is a closed society. I have friends in Vietnam who have great grandparents who immigrated to Vietnam from China and they are still identified as Chinese on their national ID cards, despite the fact that some may have never been to China and don’t speak any Chinese language. This isn’t anything new. This has been happening in Southeast Asia and Southern China for over a thousand years. It has created a dynamic where ethnic populations tend to stick together rather than being integrated into the larger society.

There are numerous examples around Southeast Asia where the larger ethnic group lives in the fertile valleys while the numerous minority tribes live in the mountains. These tribal groups form a cultural time capsule where smaller tribal remnants, some from empires from long ago, retreat to the mountains. They almost seem to be stuck in time, preserving their languages and cultures for the future.

Today’s article is the first in a series of articles about these people, to shed some light on this dynamic.

Highlands versus Lowlands

While reading a couple books² about the different ethnic groups of Vietnam, I learned that Vietnam has 54 different state recognized ethnic groups. All but four of these tribes live in the mountains of the central highlands or the northern mountains that border China and Laos. These books created a good jumping off point to learn about the archaeology and anthropology of the region to better understand where these tribes originated.

The Việt people inhabit the Red River Delta while the Mekong Delta is split between the Việt people mixed with Cham, Khmer, and Hoa minorities. The Mekong Delta contained a remnant of the Khmer people following the fall of their empire. The Cham were pushed into the Mekong following their defeat by the Vietnamese Empire during the Lê Dynasty in the Viet-Cham wars of 1471 to 1611. Hoa refugees came to Vietnam to escape political unrest during the Chinese Tang dynasty. These waves of immigration brought with them improved agricultural techniques that made the land much more productive to support a larger population.

The Mọi and the Montagnard

The Mọi and the Montagnard are names that refer to the collective mountain people. They are not ethnic groups, but a generic term for people of the mountains. The word mọi means savage when used as a noun in Vietnamese. The word Montagnard comes from French and simply means mountain people. Some consider the name mọi to be derogatory. Although the word mọi is still sometimes used today, by the late 1950’s, the Vietnamese term “người thượng”, meaning highland people, started to be used by Vietnamese to describe these people. The Vietnamese refugees to the US who came from the tribal people of the central highlands seem to prefer the French term Montagnard as their collective noun.

The people of the central highlands are a collection of native tribes from the Môn-Khmer or Cham language groups. The Môn-Khmer tribes cover the complete length of the central highlands while the tribes originating from the Cham language groups inhabit a central area west of the Vietnamese coastal cities of Nha Trang and Qui Nhơn.³

During the time of the French, the central highlands tribal territory began in Thủ Dầu Một or Bien Hoa (a little north of Saigon) and would proceed north along the mountains bordering Cambodia to a little northwest of Hue. Nowadays, Thủ Dầu Một and Bien Hoa are completely developed and the tribal groups have been pushed northward to retreat further into the mountains as plantations and suburbs encroached on tribal land over the last century.

The Mường are another group of people who were called Mọi in the mountains of northwest Vietnam. Prior to the French, it seems Mường became used as a general title for the people of the mountains of northwest Vietnam. Over time, the name reverted back to the original definition of a specific tribal people who spoke a Vietic language and lived in the mountains.

Ancient History of Humans in Vietnam

Archaeological findings trace human habitation in Vietnam back to at least 40,000 years ago, during the Paleolithic era⁴. One of the earliest discovered sites in Hòa Bình ⁵ dates back to the late Paleolithic or early Neolithic era⁶. This site was discovered in 1923 by French archaeologist Madeleine Colani. Hòa Bình has become synonymous with the early prehistoric people of Vietnam and the phrase Hoa Binh culture often refers to the Stone Age people of Southeast Asia in earlier academic texts. Today, the earliest Hoabinhian sites dates back to 41,500 BC in Yunnan, China.

Genetically, the Hoabinhian line diverged from the East Asian line before the Native Americans crossed the Bering Strait to populate the Americas. Both lines seem to have come back together when the Austro-Asiatic people moved into Hoabinhian territory and merged the DNA of both groups a few thousand years ago. There are genetic similarities with the Austro-Asiatic people of South China and Southeast Asia, but I have yet to find decent research telling the full Hoabinhian story.

Later discoveries from sites like the Hang Thẩm Khuyên and Đông Sơn caves reveal evidence of early tool-making and hunting practices that challenge the Hòa Bình hypothesis that settlers to the region settled the Mekong Delta first. Recent theories have tried to prove that rice cultivation originally developed in the Red River Delta by the Neolithic period (about 10,000 BC), marking the beginnings of a sedentary way of life. This challenges the more commonly accepted theory that rice cultivation started in Northern China and later spread into Southeast Asia. I plan to discuss this controversial theory in a later article.

The Đông Sơn culture (circa 1000 BC–1 BC), known for its advanced bronze-working, is one of Vietnam's most significant prehistoric civilizations. The famous Đông Sơn drums, intricately decorated with depictions of rituals, warfare, and daily life, highlight the cultural sophistication of the early Austro-Asiatic-speaking peoples who are considered the ancestors of the modern Kinh majority and other ethnic groups.

Anthropology tells a slightly different story.

Anthropologists realized in the mid 19th century that languages changed over time as tribal groups migrated. Linguistic changes can be charted to find a common cultural ancestor. Linguistic anthropology emerged as a branch of anthropology to study and trace these linguistic families back to common ancestors.

Tribal groups are categorized by their language family. Modern Vietnamese comes from three different language families; the Austro-Asiatic, Austronesian and Sino-Tibetan (Chinese).

The Austro-Asiatic people appear to have started around Northeastern India, Bangladesh and Nepal when the Munda language became one of the first to break off around 6,500 years ago as the culture spread around the Himalayan mountain range into central China. From central China, these people began migrating south and east along the rivers that find their headwaters in this region until they began to populate the fertile valleys from the Pearl River Delta to the Mekong Delta. Different language groups evolved as people became geographically separated. Over time these people migrated south into Southern China and Southeast Asia.

Both Viet (or Kinh) and Mường come out of the Vietic group of the Austro-Asiatic family. The Mường could be said to have kept much of their original language intact while the language of the Viet that became Vietnamese has largely been influenced by Chinese. Modern day Vietnamese contains 30% Sino-Tibetan while the written language is 60% Sino-Tibetan. It is interesting that linguists still classify Vietnamese as Austro-Asiatic despite it being a hybrid of two different language families.

Even though modern Chinese comes out of the Sino-Tibetan family doesn’t mean it is the only Chinese language. In modern day southern China and Southeast Asia, tribal people of the Neolithic began to be replaced by Austro-Asiatic people as they migrated from Northeast India into China and later to much of Southeast Asia. These groups began to clash with increasing population of Han people, who began spreading from their northern ancestral home to become the dominant ethnic group of modern day China. As the Han spread south, Austro-Asiatic tribes moved into Southeast Asia.

Austronesian tribes likely started in Taiwan and migrated south through modern day Philippines and Indonesia before coming back to the Vietnamese mainland. The original Cham people came out of this migration when the Sa Huỳnh ⁷ people came to Vietnam in 1,000 BC.

Later migrants from China come from the Sino-Tibetan language family consisting of waves of tribes from Southern China into Vietnam after the 10th century. Prior to the 10th century, Vietnam was controlled by China and there doesn’t seem to be an interest in keeping track of earlier tribal groups. Surely there was Chinese migration before the 10th century, but these people were probably assimilated into the Sino-Vietnamese culture. This is a topic I will come back to later.

This linguistic map from Wikipedia shows us the modern languages spoken today by region. The dark blue colors represent the various Austro-Asiatic language groups which occupy most of Vietnam and Cambodia while the language of Thailand originates from the Tai-Kadai language family represented with the color tan. Chinese speakers are represented with the color brown. Much of Laos is divided between Austro-Asiatic and Tai-Kadai language groups. These language groups are not nearly as clean as this map may imply because there are smaller pockets of tribal people who were left behind or have migrated into other tribal regions over the last couple thousand years.

Stay Tuned for the Next Article

The next article will discuss the individual ethnic groups of Vietnam in detail. Later articles will go into more detail about archaeology and anthropology and discuss why myths, history, archaeology and anthropology sometimes differ.

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Notes

1. Viet Kieu are people of Vietnamese ancestry.

2. Hà Văn Thư – Trần Hồng Đức; 2019. A Brief Chronology of Vietnamese History

Nghiêm Vạn Đặng, Chu Thái Sơn, Lưu Hùng; 2019. Ethnic Minorities in Vietnam

3. Here is a link to a map of the tribal boundaries of the central highlands ethnic minorities.

https://www.mhro.org/map-and-country

4. The  Paleolithic era dates to 3.3 million years ago – around 9,700 BC

5. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoabinhian

6. The Neolithic era dates to 10,000 BC to 2,000 BC.

7. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sa_Huỳnh_culture